Year by year, the number of people who remain unfound is decreasing—all thanks to positive changes in the police, which is successfully creating a nationwide system for searching for missing people. These changes were positively assessed by the Supreme Audit Office and the Ministry of the Interior.
In Poland, as the Supreme Audit Office emphasizes in the very first sentence of its summary of the inspection results, a system for searching for missing people has been created. Moreover, efforts were made to regulate by statute the activities undertaken when a person goes missing: a DNA database was created containing data on missing people and their families. This enables officers to identify missing people among individuals of unknown identity and unidentified bodies discovered throughout the country, as well as abroad.
The police have also developed procedures for handling notifications of a person's disappearance and conducting search operations, particularly in cases involving children. For this purpose, the Child Alert system was established.
In addition, a unit responsible for coordinating searches nationwide was established at Police Headquarters—the Missing Persons Search Centre. It exercises particular oversight over searches for missing people and, where justified, directly participates in search operations conducted throughout the country. A Mobile Search Support Centre and an unmanned aerial vehicle are used for this purpose.
This year, the Chief of Police approved a specialist training course for police officers dealing with missing-person cases; it will be introduced within a few months. This was preceded by pilot training for more than 240 police officers.
The high effectiveness of police search operations, which today are conducted not only in the country but also abroad, and the systematic decline in the number of people who remain unfound would not be possible if the system developed within the police were not working.
Since the 1960s, when statistics on missing-person cases began to be kept, and as of the end of 2014, more than 3,700 people had remained unfound for years. Just one year earlier, the figure was 4,061, and two years earlier it was 4,282.
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